In a nutshell, we've been hosting our place for a few years now - we were superhosts and generally speaking we've had excellent reviews. I'm not going to lie and say its perfect, but I believe that everyones opinion is different to an extent, so one person definition of perfect, might not be the next persons.
However, in a sea of excellent reviews (and we dont have thousands of reviews) we recieved a fundamentally detrimental 1 star from a guest. This guest obviously had a hidden agenda. She was extreemly rude when she got here, but then remained radio silence during her stay, but then decided to give it her best rant on the Airbnb review system.
The problem is that what she's complained about is stuff that was never advertised. So for example, she complained that we were not here when she checked in and greeted her. We never do, and it is self check in. says so on the listing. Sure, if I see the guest I'll say hello, but otherwise its their space and we wont intrude. We send messages through airbnb with words to the effect of "is everything o.k - can we get you anything etc", but other than that...
She also complained that the hottub wasnt hot when she arrived. again, if she read the rules and info, she'd find out that we dont do that - and we provide full instructions to do it yourself. Its not hard, but she's made out that it is and it would have cost her more to use the hot tub. She's said it was "unavailable" - but that simply isnt true.
There are several other things that she's mentioned that arnt true either and overall thought it wasnt worth the money and represented poor value.
Whats weirder is the review just before and just after were all 5-stars.
So the question is who's wrong here? - in my eyes if our place was such a terrible state, the review before and after would have been poor too, but they are not.
Anyway, Airbnb have said they are going to remove our listing - asked us to appeal, which we did - very succinctly pointing out what seems to have happened and my appeal has ultimately been denied.
The thing is IF Airbnb had a person looking through all the info I gave them I think its pretty obvious that the 1-star reviewer had a hidden agenda, or something else is wrong, but it seems that an actual human hasnt looked through it.
What can actually be done in this case? - does anyone know or had any previous experience?
Cheers
